Ben Guttery Campaign Materials. Black Gospel Preaching Project. JFK - Other Materials. Moody Library - Baptist Collection. Moody Library - British Pulpit Online. Moody Library - Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists. Moody Library - Selsus E. Southern Baptist Annuals Collection. Texas Collection - Harding Black. Texas Collection - Historic Waco Newspapers Texas Collection - Liberty Cemetery Project. Texas Collection - Maps. Texas Collection - Pat Neff. Texas Collection - Photographic Archive. Texas Collection - Richard L. Texas Collection - Selections.
Texas Collection - Texas Promotional Materials. Texas Collection - University Catalogs. Texas Collection - Waco City Directories. Texas Collection - War of the Rebellion Atlas.
- Pretty Kitty Kelly?
- War and Peace (Maude translation).
- New Technology-based Firms in the New Millennium: 10;
- The Sorceress of Qar (Qanar).
Waco Police Museum Archives. First line of verse. Somewhere in Ireland far over the sea.
The Original Old-Time Radio BBS
First line of chorus. Prety Kitty Kelly, she's the only girl for me. Subject - Library of Congress. Her strict nondisclosure mandates are legendary. She no longer gives interviews that she can't control. When I asked for comment on Kelley's book, a spokeswoman for Winfrey's production company, Lisa Halliday, e-mailed me the same one-line response that has been given to everyone else who inquired: So Kelley was faced with a considerable task when she decided to put together an unauthorized Winfrey biography.
But then the challenge was part of the allure. Getting her publisher to sign on wasn't easy. After all, the Oprah Winfrey Book Club has been a crucial shot in the arm for the publishing industry. An Oprah endorsement can sell millions of copies. And it's not just good for books: She stumped for Barack Obama, then a long-shot presidential candidate, in the Iowa caucuses, though she was careful to say that "I really don't know" what her backing might mean.
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Kelley got a green light for the book eventually, but like her other celebrity subjects, Winfrey wouldn't agree to be interviewed. Her presence, though, makes itself felt pretty strongly in the page book. Thousands of public utterances, "on radio, television, [in] newspapers and magazines. Kelley says she also persuaded two of Winfrey's family members to speak to her at length: Vernon Winfrey, who raised Oprah as his own but says he's not her biological father, and Katharine Carr Esters, an older first cousin who helped Vernon raise Oprah in Tennessee and whom Oprah calls "Aunt Katharine.
A Biography doesn't contain any explosive revelations, but it does flesh out some details about things Winfrey has discussed: Although Kelley did do a two-part interview with the Today show's Matt Lauer this week, Random House spokesman David Drake says there's truth behind those rumors that other media outlets have passed on interviews with the writer. Drake won't name names, but ABC reportedly is one such outlet.
Perhaps that's not surprising, given that ABC's parent company, Disney, is partnering with Winfrey on several of the new shows she'll present on the Oprah Winfrey Network. But it is troubling to some. Folkenflik says such a decision would be both troubling and a sign of how interconnected many of the modern media are.
Pretty Kitty Kelly
He says Winfrey's stature has made her untouchable to many in the broadcast media. Random House is betting that readers will be braver than some media outlets have been: Their initial run of Kelley's Oprah book is , copies. We sat down before the show began, and as I recall, Richard did most of the talking, while Oprah seemed a bit standoffish, which I didn't understand until later. He interviewed me on the air and then joined Oprah on the set with a compliment about our lively exchange.
Oprah shook her head with displeasure. I looked at the producer and asked what in the world she was talking about. I understood what she meant by "that kind of book" — an unauthorized biography written without the subject's cooperation or control — but I was perplexed by her reference to my having written a book about her relatives. The producer looked slightly uncomfortable. Oprah is close to Maria Shriver, plus she's very much in awe of the Kennedys I guess she considers herself part of the family in a way and I jotted down the exchange on the back of my book-promotion schedule, just in case the publisher asked how things had gone in Baltimore.
I had no idea that twenty-five years later Oprah Winfrey would be a supernova in our firmament, and I would devote four years to writing "that kind of book" about her. For the last three decades, I've chosen to write biographies of living icons without their cooperation and independent of their control. These people are not merely celebrities, but titans of society who have left their imprint on our culture. With each biography the challenge has been to answer the question John F.
Kennedy posed when he said, "What makes journalism so fascinating and biography so interesting is the struggle to answer the question: Without having to follow the dictates of the subject, the unauthorized biographer has a much better chance to penetrate the manufactured public image, which is crucial.
For, to quote President Kennedy again, "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
Yet I've never felt completely comfortable with the term unauthorized, probably because it sounds slightly nefarious, almost as if it involves breaking and entering. Admittedly, biography is, by its very nature, an invasion of a life — an intimate examination by the biographer, who tries to burrow into the marrow of the bone to probe the unknown and reveal the unseen. Despite my discomfort with the term, I understand why the unauthorized biography raises the hackles of its subjects, for it means an independent presentation of their lives, irrespective of their demands and decrees. It is not bended-knee biography.
It does not genuflect to fame or curtsy to celebrity, and powerful public figures, accustomed to deference, quite naturally resist the scrutiny that such a biography requires. Oprah Winfrey was no exception. At first she seemed sanguine when Crown Publishers announced in December that I would be writing her biography.
She was asked her reaction, and her publicist responded, "She is aware of the book but has no plans to contribute. I'm not discouraging it or encouraging it. By April she had changed her attitude. In a webcast with Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth, she said, "I live in a world where people write things that are not true all the time.
Somebody's working on a biography of me now, unauthorized. So I know it's going to be lots of things in there that are not true. I immediately wrote to Oprah, saying the truth was as important to me as it was to her. I repeated my intention to be fair, honest, and accurate, and again asked for an interview. I had written to her before — first as a matter of courtesy, to say that I was working on a book and hoped to present her life with empathy and insight.
I wrote several times later, asking for an interview, but did not receive a response. I should not have been surprised, considering Oprah had written her own autobiography years earlier but withdrew it before publication because she felt it had revealed too much. Still, I kept trying, but after several more unanswered letters, I remembered what John Updike said when he was stonewalled by baseball great Ted Williams: Midway into my research, I finally received a call from Oprah's publicist, Lisa Halliday, who said, "Ms.
Winfrey has asked me to tell you she declines to be interviewed. If reporters persisted, as Cheryl Reed did when she was editor of the editorial page of the Chicago Sun-Times, Oprah's publicists provided a list of prepared questions and canned answers. Halliday that I needed to be accurate in what I wrote and asked if Ms. Winfrey would be willing to check facts. Halliday said, "If you have questions of fact, you can reach out to me. In the end it was Oprah herself who turned out to be a major source of information.
In lieu of speaking to her directly and having to rely on fragmented memories, I decided to gather every interview she had given in the last twenty-give years to newspapers and magazines and on radio and in television in the United States and the United Kingdom, including Canada and Australia. I filed each — and there were hundreds — by names, dates, and topics, for a total of 2, files. From this resource I was able to use Oprah's own words with surety.
Pretty Kitty Kelly - Single by Charles Harrison on Apple Music
Laid out on a grid, the information from these interviews, plus the hundreds of interviews I did with her family, friends, classmates, and coworkers, provided a psychological profile that I could never have acquired in any other way. Gathering these interviews given over more than two decades took considerable time, but once assembled and catalogued, they were invaluable in providing her voice. Throughout this book I have been able to cite Oprah in her own words, expressing her thoughts and emotions in response to events in her life as they occurred.
Sometimes her public reflections did not jibe with the private recollections of others, but even the truths she shaved, as well as those she shared, added dimension to her fascinating persona. Being one of the most admired women in the world, Oprah Winfrey is adored by millions for her many good works.
She is an exemplar of black achievement in a white society, an African American icon who broke the barriers of discrimination to achieve unparalleled success.